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Mt Wellington property-owners facing eviction to make room for buses are outraged Auckland City intends spending more than $220 million tunnelling under an intersection and widening 2km of existing road.
That is more than Transit NZ is paying for 4km of new motorway - including six bridges and two interchanges - through Mt Roskill.
The city council wants to widen Mt Wellington Highway to add bus, cycle and service lanes for residential traffic, and to create a "grade-separated" intersection with Waipuna Rd for up to 80,000 vehicles expected to pass through it daily once a duplicate bridge is built across the Tamaki River from Pakuranga.
Its preference is for a 700m "cut-and-cover" tunnel to carry the highway under Waipuna Rd for more than $150 million to improve traffic flows, provide opportunities for intensive property redevelopment around the intersection, and allow easier crossings for pedestrians.
The council says that will require digging through difficult ground and relocating major services including sewer and water mains and pylons.
The tunnel cost will be within a $217.6 million allocation for more than doubling the width of Mt Wellington Highway to 47m or 48m and turning it into a tree-lined boulevard for people and businesses between the Southern Motorway at Sylvia Park and Triangle Rd.
But the allocation does not include unknown purchase costs for 129 houses and 10 business properties in a 1.2km sector between Hamlin and Triangle Rds, mostly along the eastern side of Mt Wellington Highway.
A further $120 million will be spent on a new 3km four-lane road from Mt Wellington Highway to Glen Innes.
There will be no increase in general traffic capacity along Mt Wellington Highway (two lanes in each direction north of Hamlin Rd), but the council wants to widen the highway for bus and cycle lanes on both sides and for one-way service lanes for residents.
The project is part of a $1.5 billion super-transport scheme of the Auckland and Manukau city councils to be developed over 15 to 20 years, with support from the Auckland Regional Transport Authority, to ease congestion by boosting public transport and to encourage urban development.
Auckland City expects to fund its $871 million share from Government subsidies, development levies, rates and road-user charges such as tolls.
That will leave Manukau to find around $600 million, of which it has so far allocated just $25 million.
On top of the scheme's $1.5 billion capital bill, the regional transport authority expects to spend $700 million in the first 10 years on extra public transport operating costs, $400 million of which will be for trains and $300 million for buses along dedicated lanes including the Panmure bridge.
Up to 383 properties between Glen Innes and Ti Rakau Drive in Pakuranga are expected to be affected by the overall scheme, which officials are calling the Auckland Manukau Eastern Transport Initiative (or Ameti) but which Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee fears may become "another Eastern Highway in drag".
Mt Wellington Highway resident Katherine Winstone, who has formed an Ameti action group with neighbours, says running extra buses along the road north to south will not solve congestion on the Southern Motorway from eastern suburbs traffic.
"More emphasis needs to be placed on rail, and with the Government's newfound commitment to electrifying the tracks, the council should be looking at ways to expand the rail network, not busways," she said in one of 560 submissions sent to the planners before a deadline of last Friday.
Retired real estate agent Edward Fenn, whose family has an investment property along Mt Wellington Highway, said it would be a serious misdirection of funds for the council to spend a quarter of its Ameti budget on a "boulevard to nowhere".
"This extravagant plan for only 1200m of road being developed as one of Auckland's widest and grandest streets is incongruous," he said, in reference to an allocation of $194 million for the Hamlin-Triangle sector alone.
If the council wanted extra bus lanes, he said, it should run these along the rail corridor, which the new arterial road to Glen Innes would follow in any case, requiring land from the back of just 19 properties.
Auckland City transport planning manager Alan Bufton said he did not want to comment on individual submissions before they could be analysed.
But he said buses needed to be on roads, "where the people are".
